"In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).
Meta’s own research on the effects of social media reduction confirms those from academic researchers. Both sets of researchers find evidence of causation, not mere correlation"